THUNDER BAY – An auto-pedestrian collision that injured a woman and her dog has renewed a push from Hillcrest Park area residents for the city to install pedestrian traffic control.
Jane Taylor was walking with her dog, Rosie, on the morning of March 18 and was crossing High Street when she and Rosie were struck by a vehicle attempting to make a left turn that hadn’t seen them.
Taylor was knocked to the ground and Rosie suffered a number of internal injuries, resulting in her being rushed to a veterinarian. Rosie continues to recover and has been prescribed painkillers.
“It truly was an accident but I’m 70 years old, so you might think I’m over the hill but I think I pay attention to my environment and this still happened,” she said on Tuesday.
“I was devastated. I thought my dog was going to die. That’s a sad thing for me. She’s my girl.”
Taylor responded by starting an online petition calling for traffic control to allow pedestrians to cross High Street. That petition has already received nearly 200 signatures.
While she acknowledged it could have been worse, Taylor said something needs to happen to make the area safer.
“Our neighbourhood is a walking neighbourhood. But now, just in the last 10 years, we have many children and we never did before. We have a lovely park right here,” she said.
“Everybody is concerned. People are afraid to cross this street. We shouldn’t have that in Thunder Bay.”
Currently, there is no controlled crossing for pedestrians on High Street between the Oliver Road and Red River Road intersections.
Red River Coun. Brian McKinnon said he had tried for the past seven years to have a crosswalk installed on High Street.
But now, with provincial Bill 31 becoming law, municipalities have the ability to implement pedestrian crossovers. Crossovers, like the one on Miles Street across from the Thunder Bay Courthouse, give drivers a red light when activated by a pedestrian waiting to cross the street.
The city’s engineering department has High Street at Bay Street identified as one of 25 potential crossover sites across Thunder Bay.
“You have to get people across. It’s much closer to realization so I’m expecting, hopefully within a year we should have something there,” McKinnon said.
That stretch of High Street is also the end of the Bay Street active transportation corridor, another factor that could help the cause for having a crossover installed.
It’s also primarily a neighbourhood safety concern that could increase accessibility of Hillcrest Park for area residents.
“That means parents have to cross over with their young kids and they’re not going to walk up to Red River Road. That’s reality,” he said. “There are all kinds of reasons why the time is now.”
Taylor doesn’t want to see the same thing, or worse, happen to anybody else.
“The signage that is there now is totally not adequate for drivers or walkers,” she said. “It’s using this as an opportunity to bring attention to a problem many people are concerned about.”
